About Sage Live
Sage is a comprehensive open source Math software package. It contains several other open source programs to combine their strengths. Sage offers a nice, integrating notebook, which runs in the webbrowser. It has many advanced options like direct Latex export and is well suited to solve mathematic problems, starting at highschool level up to top research level. Sage Live intends to be a smart platform for the distribution of Sage. It aims to be:

Sage Live offers a complete Sage package on a Lucid Puppy Quickset edition which has many flexible installation possibilities. It is distributed as an iso image (can be burned as "Live CD") and as an installer exe file for use in windows.

One of the nice features of sage is, that you can use it as a distribution of free software packages, you can start R, maxima, GAP, singular, IPython, Python (with numpy, scipy, sympy libraries) from terminal or even from the menu

Menu - Sage

Menu - Sage Components

Having said all that, I hope it is useful and it helps to broaden the potential userbase of sage and other free scientific software.

Sage Lite
Sage is such a huge package. One reason is that is comes as a complete development package. I (with some help and hints from the sage developers) stripped out lots of stuff and got a light version. Most functionality is there, also direct access to sage components like R, maxima and the python bundle (numpy, sympy, pylab ...). Only thing I found which doesn't work beside developement mode is the creation of "cython" code.

In the meantime there are 2 versions from sage lite available. Both are build with my slim package of sage 4.6. The first one is sagelite-511-46-a1.iso, which has the usual puppy functionality. The second one sage-lite-serverb1.iso has some of the puppy functions removed, but has the additional feature to run a multiuser sage server over https under restricted user permissions. This is suited for demo purposes, or for restricted classroom or workshop use to present sage.

Changelog sagelive-511-53.iso
+ updated sage version to 5.3
+ added Gnutls (for server certificate)
+ added GNU less (replace busybox less, which misses a feature and breaks sage inline help in console mode)
+ added new personalize settings (replace Countrywizard: cut down the number of poppup-windows though)
+ updated permissions so this puplet has basic multiuser capabilities
+ included ssh Daemon, so you can log in over the net
+ included preconfigured sage server (with 20 Worker accounts - potential simultanious users over the network)
+ new theme and worked to sort the menus (JWM)
- removed Abiword and some Puppy applications (some are still there but not in the menu like gparted)

Changelog sagelive-511-47.iso
+ sage autostarts on 1. boot
+ notebook is started with require_login=False open_viewer=True
+ This fixes the nuisance of the localhost:8000 not found bug of earlier versions

Changelog sagelive-511-46-r3:
+ Compiled sage from scratch (to replace the ubuntu binaries). Passes sage -testall and "make ptestlong"
(0 errors).
+ Plotting in R works out of the box in this release.
+ Updated gfortran (4.4.3)
+ GUI interface setup of savefile
+ New Menu "Sage Components" - includes GAP, Singular, Maxima, R, ECL, IPython, Python
+ included jsmathfonts for pretty notebook rendering
+ Some new wallpapers
+ Updated swapwizard (will use pagefile.sys, will mount ntfs r/w)
+ installwatch for the development package is fixed in this version (just need devx.sfs for buildutils and compilers)
+ some other small bugfixes
- Help docs may be slightly out of sync, try the online version.

There are the files:
sagelive-511-46.iso
sagelive-511-46.exe (Windows Installer)
jre_1.6.0_22.pet

it should be around 700 KB/s download link.

Experiences with windows installer:
I had some feedback and the windows installer worked on
XP, Vista, Windows 7-32 bit.

It didn't work out of the box on Windows 7 64 Bit version. No harm was done, it just hangs at the backup of the windows boot record. It is possible to finish the installation manually (either use the windows bcdedit command or there is easybcd, a little free windows program).

I didn't test on older wndws versions until now.

Java and 3d plotting

I didn't include the Java runtime environment. This is needed by the 3d plotting engine Jmol (comes originally from the chemists for viewing their molecule models). To fix that just install the pet (jre_1.6.0_22.pet) from the above download location. plot3d is actually very nice.

I made the new pet from scratch, its the classical setup where the whole package goes to /usr/share/java. Originally I thought I could use the JRE from Quickpet, but this is broken. The JRE from playdayz which is posted on the forum works fine, but it copies stuff to the /mnt/home/ directory. This is handy if you have several version from Lupu as frugal installs on the same partition. But in the case of sagelive on windows, people were worried about the integrity of their NTFS, so I figured it would better if all packages go to the savefile.

I plan to have a version with included java, improved docs and some additional small improvements (no fixed timeschedule yet).

Successfully downloaded the iso from mydrive, but its md5sum is not the
one given for the iso in the md5sum.txt file on boxen. (mydrive has no
md5sum file.) Redownloading the iso on mydrive gives the same md5sum
as the first time. Are the versions on boxen and mydrive intentionally
different, or is one of them bad?

(I frequently download files with known md5sums without anomalous
results.)

I think JRE will occupy around 100 MB in the pupsave.
I usually use 1 GB Pupsave if I have a frugal install I intend to work with (do compiling and stuff). If it is just for testing I think 512 MB will be more then enough. If you have less the 1 GB Ram it is also a good idea to have a swap (partition or file)

Those packages were made in Puppy4, so I cant garantuee that all will run without problems. So far I have only tested gnuplot and octave (just briefly) which seemed to work.

The Texmacs package don't work out of the box because this I made ad hoc in the process for the last sage-live cd and included it directly. There is a library or symlink missing. I cant remember.

Currently I try to produce a second version, with Java implemented in the base iso and other small improvements, especially an improved dokumentation. I am still not sure If I will go into making additional packages. The main reason is that I cant decide which base would be best: Lupu, Fatdog 64, Wary or even stick with 431. All have their pro's.
And it is impossible to maintain anything reasonable on multible platforms.

EDIT: I will test the other packages as time allows and will drop a short notice in this thread. However I cannot make in-deptht test.

Last night I fired up a live CD on my latest PC which has 4GB RAM. (My most recent earlier machine to that was a laptop with only 512MB RAM so ran out of memory on loading the sfs file - I didn't think before I said go!). I am not sure how much RAM is required because there seems to be a bug in the freemem applet which has an upper limit of measurement. It said 1.7GB free whether I ran your Puppy or Puppy 4.2 - which is obviously not right.

Everything started fine and I tried running the examples in the tutorial through the Sage notebook. All seemed to be OK but I didn't do that my many examples - a bit of simple maths, differentiation and a plot.

I have never used (or seen in action) Mathematica or Maple so I am not sure how Sage compares. I was a little bit suprised at the blandness of the interface - command line stuff which, as far as I could see in my quick test, relied on one knowing the Sage functions available and having to type them. GUIness has its uses!

I must admit I didn't use Sage for any real work beside to play around a bit.
I have worked with Mathematica and Matlab some years ago, so I have no comparison of the current state.

I think sage does not too bad in the comparison. The commandline is the better option. Having it running in the browser is a smart solution, because you can access the running sage engine from different computers. Designing a gui around the engine would be very limiting. Of course there is vast room for improvements.

The langugage of sage is python like (thats the core framework, probably thats also why it has such a bloated feeling). But in my opinion its the best approach to create a common platform for math software. Beside the python packages (Numpy, sympy, scipy), R is included, which is the leading package in statistcs, Then there is maxima included, which is somehow the leading open source CAS. Then there are other, more specialised projects (PARI, GAP for the number theoretists ...). You can install octave, then you have a matlab compatible open source package for numerics. It's huge, I would compare it with an aircraft carrier.

I have to say, the usage for me was rather intuitive, I was able to write a few lines of math without consulting the manual at every step and could produce results. So this is a good indication for usability. However if you want the system to specifically do something exactly a special way (e.g draw a plot such and such) then you have to tinker around. But I would say for most people its more intuitive than mathematica, because python is rather procedural (but you can do functional programming), wheras the Mathematica language is functional (but you can do procedural stuff). So for anything high school level its almost overkill, and for university undergraduate level it would do mostly just fine.

If it was me who could decide the direction of sages developement, than I would say modularise it even more, make the core lean. Lets say keep the python libraries as base. And make the other packages standard modules. Make a port to have different user-inerfaces, and especially design ports to use the packages inside sage from outside (lets say install sage with R. then install Rcmdr to access the R part of Sage and have that well known Gui for it. But its not me and the sage community is doing a good job, lets see how it goes on further.

thats just my thoughts, would like to here how you fare with it. If you find something to improve let me know
emil

Thanks for the info again. I was not criticising the command line - well not yet anyway. If Mathematica/Matlab works in a similar way then no problem. I don't suppose I will use Sage too much either but having a mathematics background I like the idea of having a free version of Mathematica/Matlab around just in case!

I wanted to put my thoughts regarding your quandry in developing Puppy Sage further. As you say there is a diffficulty in knowing which flavour of Puppy to build on - with so many good developments going on in different strands.

When I ran out of memory on my older PC I immediately thought this goes against the ethos of Puppy - runs on older hardware. That maybe the case - Sage is so powerful it needs newer hardware but I venture one way for consideration.

If you have Sage as an SFS (or a group of SFSs to cover the add-ons as well). The memory requirement will not be so high because SFSs additional to the basic Puppy are not loaded into memory. The drawbacks, of course, are that you cannot run as a Live CD and whether there is so much disk activity going on (I am assuming a frugal install) that Sage would run too slowly this way.

Having Sage as an SFS solves your dilemma as well. You develop and make sure it works with your preferred puppy. When a new pup comes along we can simply try the same SFS - no more fiddling with the underlying OS for you. Leave that to the OS experts and let you concentrate on your area of expertise - compiling Sage to work with Puppy.

I have to say I am somewhat biased in this opinion because I love the concept of modularisation via SFS, especially if things work with jrb's SFS Linker. If you want bling, you add the bling SFS (Dude). If you want a small business setup you add the Libre Office SFS. If you want the PC for mathematicians you add the Sage SFS!

One other benefit. The Sage download will be smaller - by the size of the underlying OS.

EDIT

I've just looked at the graphic above again. I realise I was not running Sage in the browser. I just clicked the Sage icon and got a terminal like interface. I guess you have to click the Sage Notebook icon to get the browser. When it asked for a password when I did that I decided I did not know enough to continue, so I didn't. I need to do some reading cos it looks nicer in the browser.

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